This is when things started to go south and the legend of the lost army begins.  After his initial victory Cambyses failed to subdue Kush in the south and had to give up his plan to attack Carthage because his Phoenician subjects refused to fight their ethnic kin.  The frustrated emperor decided to vent his rage at the Oracle of Amun located in the Siwa Oasis which refused to recognize him as Pharaoh of Egypt.  According to Herodotus the army of 50,000 disappeared in a sandstorm.  An army that size generally leaves behind some traces.  But for 2,500 years nothing was found.  If true, this solves one of the two major location mysteries of Ancient Egypt (the other is the location of the tomb of Alexander the Great which disappears from the historical record in the early third century AD).

To sum up on poor Cambyses, he came to a sticky end.  Forced to leave Egypt to deal with the revolt of his brother Bardiya, he died suddenly.  His eventual successor Darius I would say it was suicide.  Darius, a cousin, who usurped the throne from Bardiya and ruled successfully for 36 years lavished a lot of effort in blackening the reputations of the sons of Cyrus.  Cambyses comes down as a bloodthirsty and moody tyrant who initiated a tradition of royal incest in violation of Persian norms.  Bardiya suffers a worse fate.  The man deposed by Darius was dismissed as an impostor, a Magi priest named Gaumata, who killed the real son of Cyrus.   All of this justified the bloody path of Darius to the throne, sealed by his marriage to the daughters of Cyrus.  As is often the case, the winner got to write history.  In this case the victor inscribed his version in stone.

The problem with the 41st President was that unlike his predecessor and successor he struggled to connect emotionally with the American people.  Since the Great Depression the failure to capture the emotive aspect of the American presidency can make or break an American President.  With his aristocratic Yankee upbringing and ivy league background, George H. W. Bush never  managed to be a man of the people.  Coming from the now largely defunct centrist wing of the Republican party he also struggled to connect with the religious right and other hard right conservatives who increasingly constituted the true believers of the Republican Party.  The failure to connect with the public and the lukewarm relations with his base resulted in his failure to reap the benefits of the major successes in his term.

On domestic issues his term saw the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Clean Air Act, neither of which did much to endear him with his base.  However, the act that caused him the most grief was his sensible decision to raise taxes to combat the rising deficit.  This required reneging on his unfortunate pledge at the 1988 Republican Convention to not raise taxes and was the straw that broke the camel’s back with the increasingly vocal contingent of supply-siders in his party.  And then there came the recession.  This is where his inability to relate and provide assurance to the public haunted him.  When he protested loudly at the end of the presidential campaign that the recession was over, he was mocked.  The first jobs report after his presidency would show that he was right and that must have stung.  The failure to relate would result in him being the first Republican to not win re-election since Herbert Hoover (ironically Bill Clinton would be the first Democrat to be re-elected since Hoover’s successor Franklin Delano Roosevelt).

George H. W. Bush was in someways a man out of his time.  A country club Republican and an internationalist in a party rapidly being taken over by religious zealots and America firsters.  A pragmatist on foreign policy he was the first President in decades to exert pressure on Israel that brought it to the peace table and briefly offered a glimmer of peace in that part of the world.  His other foreign policy successes are well known and need not be repeated here.  He did provide the quixotic contrast of gunboat diplomacy in Panama and then a humanitarian intervention in Somalia where no direct United States interests were affected.

It is interesting to speculate what direction United States politics would have taken had Bush been re-elected.  The Gingrich led takeover of Congress would have been much harder to achieve without the early missteps of Bill Clinton.  The fourth straight Presidential loss would have severely demoralized the Democratic Party and resulted in some major infighting among its various factions.

In an age of vitriolic politics it is heartwarming to observe the friendship that has emerged between No. 41 and the man who shoved him out of the oval office.  So here is a nod to an underrated President who was had the pragmatism to make the compromises necessary to govern with a Democratic Congress, who understood the limits of American power and when to end a war, but ultimately failed because of his failure to use the propaganda arm to overcome the perception of an out of touch leader.

This is not (yet) an appraisal of Barack Obama. That book is still being written. This is the first in a series of appraisals of rulers through history and whether their reputations are deserved, undeserved or over inflated.

The Emperor Ashoka is a fine example of this. The Wikipedia entry on his life contains a list of the usual platitudes about his reign and how his reign was a golden age of peace and prosperity. The only problem is that almost all the extant data of his reign comes from pillars and rock inscriptions placed by Ashoka across his vast empire. The third Mauryan emperor knew the value of propaganda.

The story of Ashoka can be simply told. Vain arrogant prince carves a bloody path to the throne after the death of his father. Launches an aggressive campaign against a neighboring state. Dismayed by the extent of violence caused by his bloody victory he renounces war and rules according to the Dharma.

It is an inspirational story and one that has resonance through the ages. But without independent third party corroboration we will never know how much of it is true.

To begin with the outlines of the story are surprisingly similar to a previous Magadhan king and contemporary of Buddha – Ajatashatru. Ajatashatru usurped his father’s throne and killed him. He then launched a long and bloody war against his mother’s home, the Licchavi republic of Vaishali and other neighboring state. The legacy of that war was a new capital of Pataliputra (modern Patna), built to better oversee military operations. Somewhere along the way tormented by his crimes he sought out the Buddha and found peace. Conversion of the most powerful monarch in India and bringing him to the path of righteousness was a major coup for the Buddhist Sangha. Absent other sources, it is unclear how much the Ashoka tale borrowed from that of Ajatashatru.

The tales of Ashoka’s vices before his conversion including the scale of devastation of Kalinga also seem to bear the hallmarks of religious propaganda – the wretched convert brought to the light. We do not know whether Kalinga suffered devastation on a scale similar to that inflicted on Iran by the Mongols. The effects do not appear to have been as long lasting. Within 50 years after Ashoka’s death the Kalingas were vying for imperial power (depending on the dating of Kharvela).

What we do know was that Ashoka was an enthusiastic proselytizer. He sent missionaries as far west as Greece and his children were sent to (successfully) convert Sri Lanka. However, we do not know is whether the assertions on his inscriptions reflected ground realities or simply pious declarations of intent.

Ashoka failed to successfully preserve the realm created by his father and grandfather. It is customary to blame the weakness of Ashoka’s successors (and a possible civil war) for the rapid disintegration of the Mauryan empire. However, the speed at which the empire fell apart suggests that the seeds of disintegration were sowed in Ashoka’s reign.

Within 5 years after his death the Satavahanas under Simuka would be independent and most of the Deccan appears to have been lost. It is unclear as to how rapidly the rest of the empire fractured but effective authority was probably limited to the Magadhan core of the empire.

The scale of this disintegration appears eerily parallel to the collapse of the Mughal Empire following the death of Aurangzeb. While he had been an otherwise competent ruler, Aurangzeb’s bigotry drove large parts of his realm to revolt and his successors could not handle the social and political upheaval he created. Absent other sources we do not know whether Ashoka’s aggressive proselytizing created the embers of revolt that ultimately consumed his successors. What we do know is that the last Mauryan emperor, Brihadrata would be assassinated by his general Pushyamitra – a Brahmin.

The death of Ashoka brought political upheaval and 50 years later the invasion of Demetrius I of Bactria. It is not surprising that later ages, particularly the Buddhist chroniclers who spewed venom on Pushyamitra, would present the relative peace of Ashoka’s reign as a golden age. It is possible that the yearnings for the lost “golden age” and the absence of any other independent contemporary records made it possible to gloss over the deficiencies of Ashoka’s reign and exaggerate his accomplishments.